Valuing Victims: A Comparative Framing Analysis of The Washington Post’s Coverage of Violent Attacks Against Muslims and Non-Muslims
International Journal of Communication 11(2017), 1795–1815
1932–8036/20170005
Valuing Victims: A Comparative Framing Analysis
of The Washington Post’s Coverage of Violent Attacks
Against Muslims and Non-Muslims
MOHAMMED EL-NAWAWY
Queens University of Charlotte, USA
MOHAMAD HAMAS ELMASRY
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar
University of North Alabama, USA
This study examines The Washington Post’s framing of five terrorist attacks taking place
in four countries—Turkey, France, Nigeria and Belgium—during a five-month period in
2015 and 2016. Attacks in Turkey and Nigeria were perpetrated against mostly Muslim
victims, while France and Belgium attacks were carried out against mostly non-Muslims.
Results suggest meaningful differences between the way The Post framed attacks
against Western European targets, on the one hand, and attacks against Muslimmajority communities, on the other. In covering attacks on France and Belgium, The
Post used “terrorism frames” to structure coverage while consistently humanizing
victims and drawing links between European societies and the Western world more
generally. Attacks against Turkey and Nigeria were covered less prominently and were
primarily framed as internal conflicts.
Keywords: framing, terrorism, The Washington Post, humanization, Muslims
Following a series of 2015–2016 terrorist attacks victimizing both Muslims and non-Muslims,
several commentators suggested disparities in Western news attention to the events. Writers like Anne
Barnard (2016) and Haroon Moghul (2016) claimed Western news outlets were more concerned with
Western, non-Muslim victims of terror than with Muslim victims. An informal analysis by Johnson (2016)
seemed to support the accusations. His analysis, based on newspaper articles and video news reports,
found that American news media were 19 times more likely to cover European victims of terrorism than
Middle Eastern victims. Although media scholarship has yet to address this specific issue, a significant
body of research has spoken to larger issues of alleged Western news disparities in coverage of conflicts
and human tragedies affecting people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as Westerners and
non-Westerners. A separate body of literature about American news coverage of terrorism suggests that
American coverage has overrepresented Muslims as terrorists (Dixon & Williams, 2015); demonized
Mohammed el-Nawawy: [email protected]
Mohamad Hamas Elmasry: [email protected]
Date submitted: 2016–11–02
Copyright © 2017 (Mohammed el-Nawawy and Mohamad Hamas Elmasry). Licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
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International Journal of Communication 11(2017)
Muslims and avoided context about the root causes of terror (Ismail & Berkowitz, 2009; Roy & Ross,
2011); and been characterized by a bipolar us versus them approach (Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux, &
Garland, 2004). Said (1981) suggested Western media exacerbate cultural divides between Muslims and
non-Muslims, often focusing on cultural differences and ignoring overwhelming cultural similarities.
This is the first of two studies the authors will undertake comparing American newspaper
coverage of Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks committed against Western-majority and Muslimmajority societies, respectively. The current study uses qualitative framing analysis to examine The
Washington Post’s framing of five terrorist attacks taking place during a five-month period in 2015 and
2016. The five attacks were committed in Ankara, Turkey (two attacks); Paris, France; Maiduguri, Nigeria;
and Brussels, Belgium. A subsequent study will use quantitative content analysis to examine coverage of
the same five attacks in elite American newspapers. One inherent assumption of this research plan is that
both kinds of approaches—qualitative and quantitative—are needed to fully examine this issue.
Background
Over the past several years, terror attacks perpetrated by Muslim extremists have hit several
countries. While some attacks have been covered intensely by major Western media outlets, others have
gone uncovered (Kealing, 2016).
The five attacks that are the subject of this study took place in four countries—Turkey, France,
Nigeria, and Belgium—over the course of late 2015 and early 2016. The attacks in Turkey and Nigeria
were perpetrated against mostly Muslim victims, whereas the France and Belgium attacks were carried out
against mostly non-Muslims. All five attacks fit the textbook definition of terrorism: targeting civilians for
political reasons (Ganor, 2007).
Turkey Attacks
Two attacks took place in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on October 10, 2015, and March 13, 2016,
respectively. In October, two bombs detonated near the city’s central railway station, killing 97. Victims
were participating in a pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party peace rally. No party claimed responsibility,
but the Turkish government accused the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Kurdish rebel
groups (“Nearly 100 dead,” 2015). In March, car bombs detonated near a central bus stop, killing 37. A
Kurdish group named TAK, an offshoot of the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK), claimed responsibility
(“Ankara blast,” 2016). The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and
NATO (White, 2011).
Domestically, Turkey has witnessed tensions with its ethnically Kurdish minority, exemplified by a
bloody conflict since the PKK’s formulation in 1978 (Stempel, 2014).
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Nigeria Attack
A Nigerian village, Maiduguri, witnessed a bloody attack on January 30, 2016, when members of
the Boko Haram militant group set the village ablaze, killing at least 86. Among the victims were children
who were burned alive (Karimi, 2016).
Boko Haram, whose violent insurgency in northeastern Nigeria started in 2009, condemns
Western education and is trying to impose Sharia law. The group has thousands of members equipped
with advanced weapons imported from Libya and Mali (Jacob, 2013). Boko Haram is affiliated with the AlQaeda terrorist group (Smith & Parker, 2014).
ISIL in Europe: Paris and Brussels Attacks
On November 13, 2015, ISIL-affiliated youth carried out bombings and shootings in the French
capital, Paris, killing 130. Investigations showed that six of the assailants were Europeans with North
African origins. They had traveled to Syria in the months preceding the attacks (Higgins & FreytasTamura, 2015).
On March 22, 2016, the Belgian capital, Brussels, witnessed three suicide bombings—two at the
city’s main airport and one at a central metro station—that killed 32 civilians. ISIL claimed responsibility
for the attacks, carried out by five suspects, several of whom were born and raised in Brussels, but had
North African origins (Hume, 2016).
ISIL and other extremist groups have been able to recruit some young Muslims from France and
Belgium “due to those states’ staunch secularism, coupled with a sense of marginalization among
immigrant communities” (Malsin, 2016, para. 4).
Western News Media and the Relative Value of Human Life
A number of studies have assessed the relative weight allotted to human life by Western news
media, with some studies focusing on coverage of natural disasters and humanitarian crises, and other
studies focused on reportage of violent conflict. Overall, these lines of research suggest that Western news
media humanize Western victims and cover them more prominently than non-Western victims, who are
stereotyped and “Othered.”
Most of the research into Western news coverage of disasters and humanitarian crises suggests
that Western media value Western lives more than non-Western lives (Adams, 1986; Hanusch, 2008,
2012; Hawkins, 2002; Joye, 2009, 2010; Moeller, 1999; Simon, 1997; Van Belle, 2000). In relatively few
instances, researchers have found Western news media to prominently cover disasters and crises in the
non-Western world (see Hachten & Beil, 1985; Singer, Endreny, & Glassman, 1991), but this research also
suggests that Western coverage of Third World disasters is stereotypical, serving to exoticize non-Western
victims as “Other” (Campbell, 2012; Chouliaraki, 2006; Fair, 1993; Franks, 2005; Gerbner & Marvanyl,
1977).
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Research into Western news coverage of violent conflicts suggests that while Western war
reporting is increasingly sanitized in general (see Aday, 2005; King & Lester, 2005; Silcock, Schwalbe, &
Keith, 2008), non-Western victims of war are often ignored in Western reportage. For instance, Youssef
(2009) found CNN “downplayed” Iraqi civilian casualties associated with America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Griffin and Lee (1995) found that while American magazine coverage of the 1991 American war in Iraq
rarely showed dead American soldiers, dead Iraqis were almost never displayed, despite there being many
more Iraqi casualties. Much of the research on American news coverage of violent foreign conflicts
suggests American news media follow the official American government line. Herman and Chomsky (1988)
argued that American news media outline two kinds of victims in their coverage: “worthy” and
“unworthy.” Worthy victims suffer at the hands of governments opposed to the United States, whereas
unworthy victims are repressed either by the United States or an American ally.
Research into American news treatment of the Israel–Palestine conflict seems to support the
basic “worthy and unworthy victims” hypothesis. Research shows American news media strongly support
Israel, an American ally, over the Palestinians. Elmasry (2009) found that The New York Times and
Chicago Tribune covered Israeli deaths more prominently than Palestinian deaths and that Palestinianperpetrated killings were more likely to be condemned by the newspapers than Israeli-perpetrated killings,
which were often legitimated. Other studies (see Ackerman, 2001; Dunsky, 2008; Friel & Falk, 2007;
Ross, 2003) have produced similar results.
Framing Theory
Framing is a theoretical framework for understanding the meanings of texts and how they are
packaged to reflect specific elucidations. Framing is the process of highlighting dimensions in a text “in
such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or
treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman, 1993, p. 52).
Communicators can make aspects in a message more salient by choosing words, phrases,
images, symbols, sources, and associations (Entman, 1993). Pan and Kosicki (1993) posited that sentence
arrangement and organization, information gathering, source material, and types of images can be key
drivers of frames. Also, individual-level and organizational-level phenomena and constraints—including
personal backgrounds, political preferences, and editorial policies—can affect the way journalists frame
issues (Scheufele, 1999). The way journalists frame events can affect audience perceptions (Scheufele &
Tewksbury, 2007).
A news frame can be issue-focused, delving deeply into a particular event or subject (in which
case it cannot be generalizable to other similar issues), or it can be generic, as when it deals with a broad
sociopolitical field (de Vreese, 2005). Regardless of the specific or generic nature of the news frames,
journalists have to adopt a pluralistic and comprehensive approach that allows for sufficient understanding
of the contextual circumstances surrounding an event (D’Angelo, 2002).
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Method
This research employs qualitative framing analysis to examine The Washington Post’s print news
articles covering five terrorist attacks—in Ankara, Turkey (two attacks); Paris, France; Maiduguri, Nigeria;
and Brussels, Belgium—occurring over a five-month period in late 2015 and early 2016. The print edition
was selected because in the United States, print continues to be by far “the most common way of reading
newspapers” (Barthel, 2016, para. 5).
The authors chose The Post because of its status as an elite American newspaper based in
America’s capital city. The five aforementioned attacks were chosen because they took place successively,
were perpetrated by Muslim extremists, inflicted major civilian fatalities, and represented diversity
between Muslim and non-Muslim victims.
The attacks in Paris and Brussels represent attacks on key European, non-Muslim-majority cities.
The attack in Maiduguri, Nigeria, was perpetrated in a Muslim-majority section of Africa’s most populous
nation and offers an important point of comparison—in terms of geographic distance, race, and dominant
victim religious identity—with both Paris and Brussels. Given the vast cultural and geographic distance
between Western Europe and Africa, the decision was made to also analyze two attacks occurring in a
society—Ankara, Turkey—that is closer, both geographically and culturally, to France and Belgium. Ankara
is located in Europe but also represents a Muslim-majority society.
The authors aimed to study the most prominently placed Post print news article published on the
two days immediately following each attack. For example, since the Paris attack occurred on November
13, 2015, the November 14 and November 15 print editions of the paper were searched, and the most
prominently placed article about the attack in each edition was identified. The same strategy was used for
each of the five attacks; however, since The Post covered the Maiduguri, Nigeria, attack with only a single
article (on February 1, 2016), only one article about that event was analyzed. The authors thus examined
a total of nine articles: two each written about the Paris, Brussels, Ankara-October, and Ankara-March
events and one about the Maiduguri event.
Following Entman (1993) and others, this study assumes that news frames represent the most
important meaning-making and organizing formula for news texts. A qualitative analysis was selected
because such an approach facilitates in-depth exploration of the meaning of texts (Pauly, 1991). The
study’s methodological approach, qualitative framing analysis, “involves repeated and extensive
engagement with a text and looks holistically at the material to identify frames” (Connolly-Ahern &
Broadway, 2008, p. 369). The authors opted for an inductive approach—the close reading(s) allowed for
frames to emerge from the articles. After first reading articles independently, the two researchers came
together to discuss both general content directions and frames. In the analysis, attention was paid to
keywords, phrases, ordering of material, inclusion and exclusion of information, sources, quotes,
associations, and the presence and content of images.
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International Journal of Communication 11(2017)
Results
Washington Post coverage of the five terrorist attacks examined here differed markedly by event
and, in particular, type of victim targeted. In the two attacks affecting predominantly Western European
victims—Paris and Belgium—coverage was prominent, employed “terrorism frames,” and humanized
victims and mourners. Attacks against Ankara, Turkey, and Maiduguri, Nigeria—both Muslim-majority
societies—were covered less prominently. In coverage of Ankara and Maiduguri, The Post generally
avoided a terrorism frame, talked about the violence as part of internal domestic conflicts and, in the case
of Ankara, highlighted criticisms of the Turkish government.
The First Ankara Attack
The first terrorist attack in Ankara targeted civilians attending a large peace rally on October 10,
2015, and killed at least 97 people. The Post covered the attack prominently on October 11, 2015—a
front-page article, “Blasts Hit Peace Rally in Turkey,” featured a photo of a grieving man kneeling by
bodies draped in flags. This article, which continued on an inside page, was long (25 paragraphs). On an
inside page, The Post also included a second, 20-paragraph article about the attack. On October 12, the
paper devoted a single, relatively short (13 paragraphs) article to the aftermath of the attack. The most
prominently placed of the two October 11 articles and the lone October 12 article about the attack were
analyzed.
October 11, 2015
In its October 11, 2015, front-page story about the Ankara attack, The Post used the word
terrorism, but the usage was not prominent enough to warrant a terrorism frame per se. Rather, “conflict”
(Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000) and “geopolitical” (Douai & Lauricella, 2014) frames emerged from this
analysis. Also, a “humanization” frame was used to describe the victims. Topical emphasis, specific word
choices, and sources (Entman, 1993) dictated frames.
Conflict Frame. The reporter who wrote the October 10, 2015, story did not use the word
terrorism to describe the attack—although the words terror and terrorism were used by a pair of sources,
a political analyst, and the American government.
Rather than discuss the attack as terrorism, The Post referred to the attack alternatively as
“blasts,” “explosions,” “twin bombings,” and “a fiery explosion.” Importantly, the article describes the
perpetrators as “separatists,” not terrorists. Later, the piece refers to violent Kurdish activists as
“militants” and “militias” and “fighters.” The use of “separatists,” “militants,” “militias,” and “fighters”
rather than “terrorists” fed into the larger conflict frame at play in the piece. A conflict frame is one which
“emphasizes conflict between individuals, groups or institutions as a means of capturing audience interest”
(Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000, p. 95). Frames that focus on terrorism and criminality, in contrast, explain
violence as senseless aggression and serve to delegitimate specific acts of violence (Elmasry, 2009).
Warlike terms such as fighters and militias suggest a war or conflict frame rather than a terrorism frame
(Elmasry, 2009).
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The October 10, 2015, attack on Ankara was described as an act of war committed by one
warring faction against another. From the outset, the article provides an important backdrop—grounded in
an explanation of the historical conflict between the Turkish state and Kurds—for the attack. The subhead
referred to continued “violence between security forces and Kurdish separatists,” while the lead described
the attack as “a reminder of the growing conflicts Turkey faces.” The second paragraph also referenced
violence “that has flared [recently] between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists.” Later, the
article describes “Turkey’s decades-old struggle with the Kurds.” Near the article’s end, several
paragraphs discuss the historical rift.
Geopolitical Frame. To describe the attack, The Post also used a geopolitical frame, which can be
used by news outlets to emphasize “geopolitical calculations” (Douai & Lauricella, 2014, p. 15). The story’s
lead paragraph refers to Turkey’s dilemma “across the border in . . . Syria,” while the third paragraph
describes Turkey’s geopolitical alliances and considerations—specifically, this paragraph notes that Turkey
is a NATO member, a “key U.S. ally,” and that it “shares borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran.” The
paragraph also describes Turkey’s conflict with Russia over Syria. The article goes on to explain that
Syrian refugees in Turkey have been a “source of political instability.”
Humanization Frame. Contrary to patterns of previous coverage (see literature review), The
Washington Post’s October 11, 2015, article did humanize Muslim victims in Ankara. A front-page photo
showed a mourner kneeling near bodies, and a pair of photos on the inside page (onto which the article
continued) showed wounded victims. The text also used humanizing language, describing “dazed and
bloody demonstrators clinging to one another” and “bodies, some of them dismembered, lay on the
street.”
October 12, 2015
Several frames emerged from the analysis of the Post’s October 11 article about the aftermath of
the Ankara attack. Specifically, terrorism, blame, and conflict frames emerged from the close readings.
Terrorism Frame. In contrast to The Post’s October 11, 2015 article about the Ankara attack, the
newspaper’s October 12, 2015, coverage of the aftermath of the attack clearly describes the October 10,
2015, event as a “terrorist attack.” The article also quotes the Turkish government, which said it was
investigating the attack as an act of terrorism, and also a political analyst who suggested extremists
returning to Turkey from Syria could be to blame.
Blame Frame. However, rather than spend significant time describing the attack or its victims,
the article focuses primarily on criticisms of the Turkish government. The article’s most prominent frame
may be characterized as a blame frame, focusing on pinning blame against Turkish authorities. This frame
is significant, especially given that Turkish authorities were a target of the attackers.
The article’s headline, “Mourners Denounce Turkish Authorities in Wake of Attack,” sets the tone
for what follows. The lead describes “crowds of angry mourners” marching to “denounce Turkish
authorities.” The second paragraph notes that the opposition “condemned the authorities for failing to
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International Journal of Communication 11(2017)
protect the demonstration.” The third paragraph documents a protester chant, which called Turkish
President Recep Tayeb Erdogan a “murderer.” Late in the article, a Kurdish official is quoted speaking
about the philosophy of the ruling government, which he describes as “not based on the idea of
citizenship; they divide the population between us and them.” The Kurdish official goes on to say, “They
don’t see our party offices or our members . . . as things that should be protected.” The story also
features a statement from a leftist opposition group, which suggests that Erdogan was attempting to “sow
chaos ahead of elections to gain more votes.”
Conflict Frame. The Post’s October 12, 2015, article also employed a conflict frame, although to a
lesser extent than the October 11 article. “Tensions between Turkey’s government and the country’s 14
million Kurds” were described, as were previous violent attacks perpetrated by both Kurdish factions and
the government.
The Paris Attack
The Washington Post’s coverage of the November 13, 2015, Paris attack differed significantly
from the paper’s coverage of the first Ankara attack. In terms of sheer prominence, coverage of the Paris
attack dwarfed coverage of the Ankara attack. The November 14 edition of The Post featured three large
news stories about the attack, including one prominently placed front-page story. Two of the three articles
were long—29 and 28 paragraphs—while the other was fairly short (12 paragraphs). The November 15
edition featured five more news stories, including three on the front page. The articles were all relatively
long: 30, 23, 46, 29, and 27 paragraphs long.
November 14, 2015
Three dominant frames emerged from the reading of the November 14, 2015, front-page article:
a terrorism frame, a “Western values” frame, and a humanization frame.
Terrorism Frame. The Post’s November 14, 2015, article framed the November 13 attack on Paris
as an act of “terrorism.” The terrorism frame was highly prominent, and a more specific form of
terrorism—religious terrorism—was also highlighted.
Words and phrases are key drivers of frames (Entman, 1993). Variations of the word terrorism
were used in the article’s subhead and again in the article’s second paragraph. The word was also used in
multiple quotes by sources, while other, similar phrases—”terrified fans,” “extremist groups,” “suicide
bombers,” “massacre,” and “mass murder”—were also used. Superlatives, such as “deadliest day” and
“worst terrorist attack on Western soil,” were also employed.
A vivid description of terrorism was provided when The Post’s article compared the attack to the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States: “The assaults represented the deadliest day
of attacks in France since World War II and one of the worst terrorist strikes on Western soil since
September 11, 2001.” Association is an important driver of frames (Entman, 1993). The religious
dimension of the attack was highlighted by phrases such as “Islamist extremism” and “Islamist gunmen”
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and several mentions of “the Islamic State,” a reference to ISIL, which the article implicated in the attack.
The story also mentioned that Muslim extremists celebrated the attack online.
The article also spoke to a sense of terror in Paris and across Europe. The subhead said France
“tightens border controls” while the lead spoke of “scenes of horror.” Other parts of the article spoke of
security measures, including “heavily armed security forces,” the declaration of a “state of emergency,”
the “deployment of the army,” and multiple mentions of “border controls.”
Western Values Frame. The article framed the attack not as an assault on a group of people, but
rather on Paris as a whole. Importantly, France was linked to the rest of the Western world, and the
attack was described as an assault on the West more generally.
The headline spoke of an “Assault on Paris.” The suggestion that an entire city was the target of
the attack represents a departure from coverage of the Ankara attack—the headline of The Post’s most
prominent article about the Ankara attack said that violence from that incident was carried out against “a
peace rally.” The second paragraph highlighted other attacks on Western soil, and the fifth paragraph
highlighted condemnations from “World leaders”—later in the article, American President Barack Obama is
quoted underscoring Western values: “He said the wave of violence was not just an assault on France but
‘an attack on all of humanity and universal values we share.’”
Humanization Frame. A humanization frame also emerged from the close reading of The Post’s
November 14, 2015, article. The article described “carnage” and explained how civilians were gunned
down while carrying out normally safe activities—”where tourists and residents had been enjoying the sort
of experiences . . . that define Friday night in Paris. . . . Soccer games, concerts and evening meals.”
Four separate photographs displayed either wounded victims or people fleeing violence, with each
photo including a caption describing scenes in detail. Also, the article noted that “People . . . fled in panic”
and that there were “piles of bodies in the street.” There was also specific mention of victims—one section
said victims were “wrapped in gold-colored heat blankets” and “had blood splattered on their clothing.”
One sentence noted that some victims “cried.” The article also featured multiple quotes from victims and
eyewitnesses describing scenes of violence.
November 15, 2015
On the second day of coverage of the Paris attack, The Post covered the event prominently. The
most prominently placed articles were three front-page stories placed side-by-side. To facilitate fair
comparison, just one of these articles was selected—the longest of the three, headlined “From Typical to
Terror in a Half-Hour.” The article was dominated by a terrorism frame and a humanization frame.
Terrorism Frame. The headline invoked the word terror, while the rest of the article described—in
vivid detail—specific scenes of violence. For example, one section reads, “At 9:20 p.m., an explosion
boomed through the stadium. A suicide bomber [blew] himself up outside, killing one passerby.” Another
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section reads, “Moments later, at 9:25 p.m., two gunmen stepped out . . . in front of Le Carillon, a modest
café-bar . . . and started shooting.”
The beginning of another paragraph says, “The shooters then walked across the street and
opened fire at a restaurant.” Later, the article reads, “Gunmen with assault weapons stepped out . . . and
opened fire at an Italian restaurant . . . a nearby café . . . and a laundromat.” Other suicide bombings are
described later in the article in similar detail.
The article also features several quotes from eyewitnesses describing scenes of violence. One
eyewitness was quoted as saying that the gunmen opened fire at one location for “at least three minutes,”
and another said that “a lot of people started screaming . . . some of them were running.” One person at
the scene of one shooting said, “We were lying down on the floor, trying not to move, pretending we were
dead . . . we could hear gunshots, screaming.” Later in the article, a political motivation was provided by
one eyewitness, a woman named Jasmine: “[The attackers] said, ‘What you’ve done to Syrians . . . you’re
paying for it.”
Humanization Frame. Much of the article discusses victims and witnesses of the attack.
Personalization is one key component of victim humanization (Elmasry, 2009). Importantly, personal
details, including names, ages, and occupations, are provided. Also, and as detailed above, several citizen
eyewitnesses were quoted in the story.
Details are provided about Stefano—”a 30-year-old Brazilian citizen working in Paris as an
artist”—and his involvement in the event. The article says, “Stefano saw his friend Gabriel lying on the
sidewalk covered in blood.” Stefano’s wife, Laurine Durand, was also quoted.
Other civilians quoted include a 32-year-old woman named Juliette, a technician named Louis H.,
a 49-year-old American named Helen Jane Wilson, and two citizens—Jasmine and Mary Sheridan—
identified only by their names. Some of those sourced were quoted in detail and provided information
about the scenes they witnessed, including lucid descriptions of both violence and fears. Details about one
of the deceased—a 23-year-old American California State University student, Nohemi Gonzalez—were also
provided.
The Maiduguri, Nigeria, Attack
The Maiduguri, Nigeria, attack was covered scantly by The Washington Post. Only a single eightparagraph article on page A10 of the February 1, 2016, edition was devoted to the incident. No
photographs or other images were published.
February 1, 2016
The Post’s article employed both “senseless aggression” and humanization frames.
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Senseless Aggression Frame. Although Boko Haram was identified as the perpetrator of the
attack, The Post did not use any variations of the word terrorism in its coverage. The Post covered the
violence in detail, describing it as senseless aggression committed by “extremists.” The article did not
provide background on Boko Haram, mention that the group is an Al-Qaeda offshoot, or discuss the
violence as part of the problem of international terrorism. These omissions are meaningful. Importantly,
the piece framed the event as an internal, domestic problem and attributed it to “homegrown Islamist
extremists” and a “six-year Islamist uprising” that has resulted in the deaths of “20,000 people.” Overall,
then, the senseless aggression frame was characterized by an emphasis on local instability, rather than
global terrorism.
Humanization Frame. The article goes to some length to humanize victims, beginning with a
narrative lead describing, in vivid detail, an eyewitness account of the violence. The lead mentions “the
screams of children burning to death.” The lead is followed by a description of “charred corpses and bodies
with bullet wounds littered [in] the streets.”
The Second Ankara Attack
The second Ankara attack studied here—carried out March 13, 2016—was not covered
prominently by The Washington Post in the two days following the event. Although the attack targeted a
busy area, included 37 civilian casualties, and represented a continuation of earlier terrorism in Ankara,
just a single article was devoted to the attack on both March 14, 2016, and March 15, 2016. Both articles
were published on inside pages (A8 and A10, respectively), but the March 14 article was “teased” with a
short blurb on the front page.
March 14, 2016
The March 14, 2016, article was teased with a short headline blurb that read, “Violence in
Ankara,” followed by a short description: “A car bomb near a busy square along a main boulevard in
Turkey’s capital left at least 34 people dead.” The decision to avoid the word terrorism fed into a conflict
frame, which emerged from the analysis. The article also employed a geopolitical frame.
Conflict Frame. The article, which, at just 13 paragraphs long, was relatively short, used
variations of the word terrorism only twice, both near the end of the article and at neither time to describe
the violent event at issue. Rather, word choices dictated a conflict frame. The article’s main headline used
the word blast to describe the violence, while the subhead used the phrase “major bombing.” The lead
paragraph described the violence as “a car bomb in the heart of the Turkish capital.” The article continued
to use similar phrasing—”explosion,” “bombing,” “blast.” The article referred to the attackers as “militants”
and speculated that the perpetrators were members of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group
officially labeled a terrorist organization by both the United States and Turkey and which has claimed
responsibility for numerous civilian-targeted bombings.
Perhaps more important, the article’s general emphasis was on the ongoing conflict between the
Turkish government and Kurds. The subhead said that the bombing “raises fears that wars are spreading,”
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the lead paragraph noted “that violence from the war against Kurdish militants in the southeast is spilling
into Turkish cities,” and the article later spoke of “escalating violence between the Turkish government
and the PKK.” The article went on to both explicitly link the PKK to the attack and describe earlier attacks
carried out by the group.
Geopolitical Frame. Much of the article’s remaining topical emphasis focused on Turkey’s larger
regional policies and geopolitical considerations. For instance, the article said, “The violence has unnerved
Turkey, which finds itself entangled in fights on two fronts, against the Kurds in southeastern Turkey and
against the Islamic State in Syria. The two wars are becoming ever more closely intertwined.” The article
also noted that “the fighting between Turkey and the YPG [Syrian People’s Protection Units] has caused
friction with the United States, too, which is allied with both of them in the war against the Islamic State.”
March 15, 2016
On March 15, 2016, The Washington Post devoted just one small (10 paragraphs) article about
the March 14, 2016, attack. The article focused not on the attack per se, but mostly on the Turkish
government’s response. When the article did speak to the March 14 attack, the dominant frame was,
again, a conflict frame.
Conflict Frame. The article, titled “Turkey Hits Kurdish Militants’ Positions,” focused mostly on
Turkey’s military response, something which fed into the dominant conflict frame that characterized the
piece.
The March 14 attack was referred to as a “separatist bombing” and a “blast” and the perpetrators
as “Kurdish militants,” “separatists,” and “attackers.” The attack and investigation were described, but no
variations of the word terrorism were used at any point in the article.
The news story said the conflict between the Kurds and Turkish government could be
“spreading,” and mentioned Turkish government strikes against “PKK positions.” The piece noted the PKK
has “waged a violent campaign since the 1980s.” Previous PKK attacks were described, as were acts of
Turkish government violence. These editorial decisions took focus away from the attack and placed focus
on the larger battle between the PKK and Turkey.
The Belgium Attack
On the two days following the attack on Belgium, The Washington Post offered up very prominent
coverage of the event. On both days, five news articles were published, including three on each front
page—in all, then, there were 10 articles and six front-page articles about the attack. In addition, there
were many photographs, including multiple large, half-page photographs. Most of the published articles
were quite long. The three front-page articles published on March 23, 2016, measured 29, 34, and 23
paragraphs long, and the remaining two articles were 22 and 24 paragraphs long. On March 24, 2016, the
three front-page articles were 34, 25, and 25 paragraphs long, and the remaining two articles were 15
and 25 paragraphs long.
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The most prominently placed article on each day was analyzed. The examined articles were the
longest of the published front-page reports. Both articles began above the fold.
March 23, 2016
On March 23, 2016, the most prominently placed article in The Washington Post about the
Belgium attack was titled “Suicide Bombs at Airport, on Subway.” The subhead read, “Officials had
expected an attack but were stunned.” The dominant frames emerging from the analysis were a terrorism
frame and a humanization frame.
Terrorism Frame. A terrorism frame was established by both the headline and lead, which read,
in part, “Islamic State suicide bombers brought terror, chaos and bloodshed to the city at the heart of
European unity on Tuesday.” Throughout the article, variations of the word terrorism, comparisons to
previous terrorist attacks perpetrated on Western soil, and frequent links and references to the “Islamic
State”—an organization universally recognized as a terrorist group—served to drive home the terrorism
frame.
The terror frame was also driven home by vivid descriptions of the violent acts. The story noted
that the “magnitude” of the attack “was stunning,” while descriptions such as “nail-spewing bombs,”
“mass killings,” “explosive devices loaded with nails and chemicals” helped cement the terrorism frame.
The piece also spoke to a sense of fear among people in Belgium and across Europe, highlighting
persistent fears and suggesting that people across Europe should remain scared of the possibility of future
attacks. For example, the article mentioned “a renewed sense of threat that spilled far beyond Brussels,”
while also noting that “Tuesday’s mass killings add [Brussels] to an ignominious but growing list of
European capitals that have been struck in the past year by deadly attacks . . . by the Islamic State.” The
article referenced “evidence that more [attacks] could be on the way,” and also referred to “a tide of
homegrown extremism.” The article went further, noting that the Islamic State “has repeatedly threatened
to hit Europe at its core.” A quote from the Belgian prime minster also helped establish the sense of fear:
“What we had feared has happened.” Near the end of the news story, further detail about larger European
fears was provided: “The latest bloodshed made clear that European capitals remain perilously
vulnerable.” A terrorism expert was quoted at the end of the article: “This is a kind of scenario every
capital in Europe feared.”
The article described Belgian’s terrorist threat as being derived from the Islamic State, which, the
article said, is based on both “foreign fighters [from Syria]” and homegrown terrorists, those who have
been “radicalized in [Belgian] cities.”
Humanization Frame. The Post article examined here humanized victims of the Belgium attack,
feeding into a dominant humanization frame. Three separate photographs of victims and rich descriptions
of victim struggle were key drivers of the frame.
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One photo, placed prominently on the front page, above the fold, showed two bloodied female
victims. A second photo on the inside page showed a wounded man being cared for by paramedics. A third
photo including the caption, “Airport workers leave the terminal. Many of those injured in the explosions
lost limbs as shrapnel radiated through packed crowds.”
The article body also noted that “many of the injured lost limbs as shrapnel from the blasts
radiated through packed crowds,” while also mentioning that “children” were seen “cowering on a bloody
floor amid the maimed and the dead.” A description of the subway scene said, “Footage . . . revealed
desperate scenes as people dressed for a day’s work stumbled from the mangled wreckage into a smokedrenched tunnel.”
March 24, 2016
The article examined from The Post’s March 24 coverage was titled “Bombings Push a Battered
Continent Even Closer to Its Breaking Point.” This article represented a departure from other articles in
that it focused only tangentially on the March 22, 2016, bombings. The article focused primarily on the
larger consequences of terrorism for Europe. The dominant frame that emerged from the analysis of this
article was an “Islamist terrorism endangers Europe” frame.
Islamist Terrorism Endangers Europe Frame. The article’s headline, noting that Europe is a
“battered continent” and close to its “breaking point” helped establish the article’s dominant frame. The
lead paragraph, meanwhile, built on the headline by associating modern-day Europe with mid-20th
century Europe. Entman (1993) argued that “association” can be an important element in the framing
process.
Specifically, the story used a narrative lead focusing on an elderly man, Corrado Pirzio-Biroli, who
was nearly killed in the March 22, 2016, attack on Belgium. Pirzio-Biroli, the lead says, “was a wartime
prisoner” as a child, while his “mother was held in a concentration camp” and his grandfather “was hanged
for an aborted attempt to overthrow Hitler.” The article then made the explicit link between the two eras
in question and the kinds of violent crimes that characterized them: “And in the Europe of his old age, the
75-year-old with twinkling blue eyes narrowly missed being blown up on Tuesday morning as he rode the
Brussels subway.”
The article then referenced the “Islamic State bomber” that carried out the subway bombing, and
said that “the very idea of Europe [is now] under extraordinary strain.” The mentioning of the “Islamic
State” and “extraordinary strain” suggested that Islamist terrorism is one of the primary reasons for
Europe’s trauma. The rest of the article makes this clear with mentions of an “unparalleled inflow of
refugees” and “the reality of mass-casualty attacks in its largest cities.” The headline on the inside page,
onto which the article continues, drove the point home: “Homegrown bombings, migrant crisis paint
Europe as a continent in disarray.”
The article noted that Pirzio-Biroli is scared “for the continent’s future,” with quotes from both the
French Prime Minister and a Carnegie research analyst echoing his sentiments. Pirzio-Biroli was later
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quoted again: “We’re in a very deep crisis,” he said. The article noted that the March 22 attacks “quite
literally shook the foundations of the E.U.” and added to “a palpable sense that Europe can’t cope with its
many overlapping crises.” The news story also said that European involvement in the Middle East led
directly to both a “historic number of refugees” coming to Europe and the increase of “radicalization at
home.” Overall, the article’s collective emphasis on refugees, Muslim extremism, violence, and an
uncertain future worked to solidify the “Islamist terrorism endangers Europe” frame.
Discussion
Results from this analysis suggest meaningful differences between the way The Washington Post
framed a pair of Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks against Western European targets, on the one hand,
and three other attacks against Muslim-majority communities, on the other hand. In coverage of the Paris
and Belgium attacks, The Post used terrorism frames to structure coverage, while consistently humanizing
victims and drawing links between European societies and the Western world more generally. In contrast,
attacks against Ankara and Maiduguri, which were covered much less prominently, were primarily framed
as internal conflicts. The Post did humanize victims of both Ankara and Maiduguri, but the paper was less
likely to humanize victims of these attacks than they were to humanize victims in Paris and Brussels. For
example, in covering Ankara and Maiduguri, The Post provided fewer images of victims and did not include
as much detail of victim fear and struggle, victim quotes, or personal victim details (e.g., names, ages,
and occupations).
Some of the framing differences can be attributed to the different nature of the events. Although
the analysis has sought an apples-to-apples comparison—by selecting prominent attacks with significant
casualties carried out during the same basic time period—there are important differences between the
attacks. Most important, the violence in Ankara was carried out as part of a larger context—an ongoing
conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state. This backdrop may be one reason for The Post’s
alternative framing of the Ankara attacks. Similarly, a violent Boko Haram uprising has been ongoing in
Nigeria for several years. However, these political differences do not completely explain such vast framing
differences.
In the end, both the Ankara and Maiduguri attacks easily fit the textbook definition of terrorism
(Ganor, 2007), and both the PKK and Boko Haram are considered terrorist organizations by the United
States and NATO. Moreover, the attacks inflicted significant casualties—the total number of casualties
from the two Ankara attacks, 140, was similar to the total number of casualties from the Paris and
Belgium attacks (161). Meanwhile, the Boko Haram attack inflicted the second most casualties of the five
studied attacks. The larger conflicts between the Turkish state and the Kurds, and Boko Haram and the
Nigerian state, are significant details, but so is the fact that armed fighters chose to target civilians in
these conflicts. The fact that The Post only scantily covered the Nigeria attack, which claimed nearly 100
victims, is also significant and further underscores a point that other authors (see Barnard, 2016) have
made in prior writing: Some American newspapers pay less attention to non-Western, non-Christian, nonWhite victims.
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Importantly, the frame delineations laid out here do not tell the entire story of The Washington
Post coverage of the attacks. There was a type of bipolarity at play in all of The Post’s coverage—localized
in coverage of Ankara and Maiduguri, and globalized in coverage of both Paris and Brussels. In covering
Ankara and Maiduguri, the newspaper highlighted domestic divisions and local discord. This focus on the
domestic division deemphasized terrorism as a global phenomenon. This deemphasis suggested that
violence against civilians in Turkey and Nigeria does not fit the standard definition of terrorism, belonging,
instead, to a different category that is the byproduct of local volatility. In this way, The Post localized what
is technically a global phenomenon. In contrast, in covering Paris and Belgium, The Post globalized the
local, placing both attacks in the larger context of the West’s “war on terror.” In doing this, the paper
suggested unity of Western societies, contexts, and values.
Although one could argue that the Turkish violence, in particular, was fundamentally different
because it was not immediately claimed by ISIL, this argument misses the mark. First, ISIL did claim
responsibility for one of the Ankara attacks. Second, and as noted above, both Ankara attacks fit the
standard definition of terrorism, and the PKK, likely responsible for the first attack, is classified as a
terrorist organization by major international entities. Third, and most important, if The Post’s Paris and
Belgium coverage was driven primarily by the fact that Islamist terrorists carried out the attacks, why did
the newspaper not prominently cover the attack in Nigeria, which was carried out by an Al-Qaeda affiliate?
A more plausible explanation for The Post’s framing and attention differences, then, might lie in previous
literature about Western news media coverage of non-Western human life. As described in the literature
review, researchers have noted discrepancies in Western news treatment of Western and non-Western
victims. The biggest difference between Ankara and Maiduguri, on the one
1932–8036/20170005
Valuing Victims: A Comparative Framing Analysis
of The Washington Post’s Coverage of Violent Attacks
Against Muslims and Non-Muslims
MOHAMMED EL-NAWAWY
Queens University of Charlotte, USA
MOHAMAD HAMAS ELMASRY
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar
University of North Alabama, USA
This study examines The Washington Post’s framing of five terrorist attacks taking place
in four countries—Turkey, France, Nigeria and Belgium—during a five-month period in
2015 and 2016. Attacks in Turkey and Nigeria were perpetrated against mostly Muslim
victims, while France and Belgium attacks were carried out against mostly non-Muslims.
Results suggest meaningful differences between the way The Post framed attacks
against Western European targets, on the one hand, and attacks against Muslimmajority communities, on the other. In covering attacks on France and Belgium, The
Post used “terrorism frames” to structure coverage while consistently humanizing
victims and drawing links between European societies and the Western world more
generally. Attacks against Turkey and Nigeria were covered less prominently and were
primarily framed as internal conflicts.
Keywords: framing, terrorism, The Washington Post, humanization, Muslims
Following a series of 2015–2016 terrorist attacks victimizing both Muslims and non-Muslims,
several commentators suggested disparities in Western news attention to the events. Writers like Anne
Barnard (2016) and Haroon Moghul (2016) claimed Western news outlets were more concerned with
Western, non-Muslim victims of terror than with Muslim victims. An informal analysis by Johnson (2016)
seemed to support the accusations. His analysis, based on newspaper articles and video news reports,
found that American news media were 19 times more likely to cover European victims of terrorism than
Middle Eastern victims. Although media scholarship has yet to address this specific issue, a significant
body of research has spoken to larger issues of alleged Western news disparities in coverage of conflicts
and human tragedies affecting people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds as well as Westerners and
non-Westerners. A separate body of literature about American news coverage of terrorism suggests that
American coverage has overrepresented Muslims as terrorists (Dixon & Williams, 2015); demonized
Mohammed el-Nawawy: [email protected]
Mohamad Hamas Elmasry: [email protected]
Date submitted: 2016–11–02
Copyright © 2017 (Mohammed el-Nawawy and Mohamad Hamas Elmasry). Licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
1796 M. el-Nawawy and M. H. Elmasry
International Journal of Communication 11(2017)
Muslims and avoided context about the root causes of terror (Ismail & Berkowitz, 2009; Roy & Ross,
2011); and been characterized by a bipolar us versus them approach (Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux, &
Garland, 2004). Said (1981) suggested Western media exacerbate cultural divides between Muslims and
non-Muslims, often focusing on cultural differences and ignoring overwhelming cultural similarities.
This is the first of two studies the authors will undertake comparing American newspaper
coverage of Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks committed against Western-majority and Muslimmajority societies, respectively. The current study uses qualitative framing analysis to examine The
Washington Post’s framing of five terrorist attacks taking place during a five-month period in 2015 and
2016. The five attacks were committed in Ankara, Turkey (two attacks); Paris, France; Maiduguri, Nigeria;
and Brussels, Belgium. A subsequent study will use quantitative content analysis to examine coverage of
the same five attacks in elite American newspapers. One inherent assumption of this research plan is that
both kinds of approaches—qualitative and quantitative—are needed to fully examine this issue.
Background
Over the past several years, terror attacks perpetrated by Muslim extremists have hit several
countries. While some attacks have been covered intensely by major Western media outlets, others have
gone uncovered (Kealing, 2016).
The five attacks that are the subject of this study took place in four countries—Turkey, France,
Nigeria, and Belgium—over the course of late 2015 and early 2016. The attacks in Turkey and Nigeria
were perpetrated against mostly Muslim victims, whereas the France and Belgium attacks were carried out
against mostly non-Muslims. All five attacks fit the textbook definition of terrorism: targeting civilians for
political reasons (Ganor, 2007).
Turkey Attacks
Two attacks took place in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on October 10, 2015, and March 13, 2016,
respectively. In October, two bombs detonated near the city’s central railway station, killing 97. Victims
were participating in a pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party peace rally. No party claimed responsibility,
but the Turkish government accused the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Kurdish rebel
groups (“Nearly 100 dead,” 2015). In March, car bombs detonated near a central bus stop, killing 37. A
Kurdish group named TAK, an offshoot of the Kurdistan’s Workers Party (PKK), claimed responsibility
(“Ankara blast,” 2016). The PKK is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and
NATO (White, 2011).
Domestically, Turkey has witnessed tensions with its ethnically Kurdish minority, exemplified by a
bloody conflict since the PKK’s formulation in 1978 (Stempel, 2014).
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Nigeria Attack
A Nigerian village, Maiduguri, witnessed a bloody attack on January 30, 2016, when members of
the Boko Haram militant group set the village ablaze, killing at least 86. Among the victims were children
who were burned alive (Karimi, 2016).
Boko Haram, whose violent insurgency in northeastern Nigeria started in 2009, condemns
Western education and is trying to impose Sharia law. The group has thousands of members equipped
with advanced weapons imported from Libya and Mali (Jacob, 2013). Boko Haram is affiliated with the AlQaeda terrorist group (Smith & Parker, 2014).
ISIL in Europe: Paris and Brussels Attacks
On November 13, 2015, ISIL-affiliated youth carried out bombings and shootings in the French
capital, Paris, killing 130. Investigations showed that six of the assailants were Europeans with North
African origins. They had traveled to Syria in the months preceding the attacks (Higgins & FreytasTamura, 2015).
On March 22, 2016, the Belgian capital, Brussels, witnessed three suicide bombings—two at the
city’s main airport and one at a central metro station—that killed 32 civilians. ISIL claimed responsibility
for the attacks, carried out by five suspects, several of whom were born and raised in Brussels, but had
North African origins (Hume, 2016).
ISIL and other extremist groups have been able to recruit some young Muslims from France and
Belgium “due to those states’ staunch secularism, coupled with a sense of marginalization among
immigrant communities” (Malsin, 2016, para. 4).
Western News Media and the Relative Value of Human Life
A number of studies have assessed the relative weight allotted to human life by Western news
media, with some studies focusing on coverage of natural disasters and humanitarian crises, and other
studies focused on reportage of violent conflict. Overall, these lines of research suggest that Western news
media humanize Western victims and cover them more prominently than non-Western victims, who are
stereotyped and “Othered.”
Most of the research into Western news coverage of disasters and humanitarian crises suggests
that Western media value Western lives more than non-Western lives (Adams, 1986; Hanusch, 2008,
2012; Hawkins, 2002; Joye, 2009, 2010; Moeller, 1999; Simon, 1997; Van Belle, 2000). In relatively few
instances, researchers have found Western news media to prominently cover disasters and crises in the
non-Western world (see Hachten & Beil, 1985; Singer, Endreny, & Glassman, 1991), but this research also
suggests that Western coverage of Third World disasters is stereotypical, serving to exoticize non-Western
victims as “Other” (Campbell, 2012; Chouliaraki, 2006; Fair, 1993; Franks, 2005; Gerbner & Marvanyl,
1977).
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Research into Western news coverage of violent conflicts suggests that while Western war
reporting is increasingly sanitized in general (see Aday, 2005; King & Lester, 2005; Silcock, Schwalbe, &
Keith, 2008), non-Western victims of war are often ignored in Western reportage. For instance, Youssef
(2009) found CNN “downplayed” Iraqi civilian casualties associated with America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Griffin and Lee (1995) found that while American magazine coverage of the 1991 American war in Iraq
rarely showed dead American soldiers, dead Iraqis were almost never displayed, despite there being many
more Iraqi casualties. Much of the research on American news coverage of violent foreign conflicts
suggests American news media follow the official American government line. Herman and Chomsky (1988)
argued that American news media outline two kinds of victims in their coverage: “worthy” and
“unworthy.” Worthy victims suffer at the hands of governments opposed to the United States, whereas
unworthy victims are repressed either by the United States or an American ally.
Research into American news treatment of the Israel–Palestine conflict seems to support the
basic “worthy and unworthy victims” hypothesis. Research shows American news media strongly support
Israel, an American ally, over the Palestinians. Elmasry (2009) found that The New York Times and
Chicago Tribune covered Israeli deaths more prominently than Palestinian deaths and that Palestinianperpetrated killings were more likely to be condemned by the newspapers than Israeli-perpetrated killings,
which were often legitimated. Other studies (see Ackerman, 2001; Dunsky, 2008; Friel & Falk, 2007;
Ross, 2003) have produced similar results.
Framing Theory
Framing is a theoretical framework for understanding the meanings of texts and how they are
packaged to reflect specific elucidations. Framing is the process of highlighting dimensions in a text “in
such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or
treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman, 1993, p. 52).
Communicators can make aspects in a message more salient by choosing words, phrases,
images, symbols, sources, and associations (Entman, 1993). Pan and Kosicki (1993) posited that sentence
arrangement and organization, information gathering, source material, and types of images can be key
drivers of frames. Also, individual-level and organizational-level phenomena and constraints—including
personal backgrounds, political preferences, and editorial policies—can affect the way journalists frame
issues (Scheufele, 1999). The way journalists frame events can affect audience perceptions (Scheufele &
Tewksbury, 2007).
A news frame can be issue-focused, delving deeply into a particular event or subject (in which
case it cannot be generalizable to other similar issues), or it can be generic, as when it deals with a broad
sociopolitical field (de Vreese, 2005). Regardless of the specific or generic nature of the news frames,
journalists have to adopt a pluralistic and comprehensive approach that allows for sufficient understanding
of the contextual circumstances surrounding an event (D’Angelo, 2002).
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Method
This research employs qualitative framing analysis to examine The Washington Post’s print news
articles covering five terrorist attacks—in Ankara, Turkey (two attacks); Paris, France; Maiduguri, Nigeria;
and Brussels, Belgium—occurring over a five-month period in late 2015 and early 2016. The print edition
was selected because in the United States, print continues to be by far “the most common way of reading
newspapers” (Barthel, 2016, para. 5).
The authors chose The Post because of its status as an elite American newspaper based in
America’s capital city. The five aforementioned attacks were chosen because they took place successively,
were perpetrated by Muslim extremists, inflicted major civilian fatalities, and represented diversity
between Muslim and non-Muslim victims.
The attacks in Paris and Brussels represent attacks on key European, non-Muslim-majority cities.
The attack in Maiduguri, Nigeria, was perpetrated in a Muslim-majority section of Africa’s most populous
nation and offers an important point of comparison—in terms of geographic distance, race, and dominant
victim religious identity—with both Paris and Brussels. Given the vast cultural and geographic distance
between Western Europe and Africa, the decision was made to also analyze two attacks occurring in a
society—Ankara, Turkey—that is closer, both geographically and culturally, to France and Belgium. Ankara
is located in Europe but also represents a Muslim-majority society.
The authors aimed to study the most prominently placed Post print news article published on the
two days immediately following each attack. For example, since the Paris attack occurred on November
13, 2015, the November 14 and November 15 print editions of the paper were searched, and the most
prominently placed article about the attack in each edition was identified. The same strategy was used for
each of the five attacks; however, since The Post covered the Maiduguri, Nigeria, attack with only a single
article (on February 1, 2016), only one article about that event was analyzed. The authors thus examined
a total of nine articles: two each written about the Paris, Brussels, Ankara-October, and Ankara-March
events and one about the Maiduguri event.
Following Entman (1993) and others, this study assumes that news frames represent the most
important meaning-making and organizing formula for news texts. A qualitative analysis was selected
because such an approach facilitates in-depth exploration of the meaning of texts (Pauly, 1991). The
study’s methodological approach, qualitative framing analysis, “involves repeated and extensive
engagement with a text and looks holistically at the material to identify frames” (Connolly-Ahern &
Broadway, 2008, p. 369). The authors opted for an inductive approach—the close reading(s) allowed for
frames to emerge from the articles. After first reading articles independently, the two researchers came
together to discuss both general content directions and frames. In the analysis, attention was paid to
keywords, phrases, ordering of material, inclusion and exclusion of information, sources, quotes,
associations, and the presence and content of images.
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International Journal of Communication 11(2017)
Results
Washington Post coverage of the five terrorist attacks examined here differed markedly by event
and, in particular, type of victim targeted. In the two attacks affecting predominantly Western European
victims—Paris and Belgium—coverage was prominent, employed “terrorism frames,” and humanized
victims and mourners. Attacks against Ankara, Turkey, and Maiduguri, Nigeria—both Muslim-majority
societies—were covered less prominently. In coverage of Ankara and Maiduguri, The Post generally
avoided a terrorism frame, talked about the violence as part of internal domestic conflicts and, in the case
of Ankara, highlighted criticisms of the Turkish government.
The First Ankara Attack
The first terrorist attack in Ankara targeted civilians attending a large peace rally on October 10,
2015, and killed at least 97 people. The Post covered the attack prominently on October 11, 2015—a
front-page article, “Blasts Hit Peace Rally in Turkey,” featured a photo of a grieving man kneeling by
bodies draped in flags. This article, which continued on an inside page, was long (25 paragraphs). On an
inside page, The Post also included a second, 20-paragraph article about the attack. On October 12, the
paper devoted a single, relatively short (13 paragraphs) article to the aftermath of the attack. The most
prominently placed of the two October 11 articles and the lone October 12 article about the attack were
analyzed.
October 11, 2015
In its October 11, 2015, front-page story about the Ankara attack, The Post used the word
terrorism, but the usage was not prominent enough to warrant a terrorism frame per se. Rather, “conflict”
(Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000) and “geopolitical” (Douai & Lauricella, 2014) frames emerged from this
analysis. Also, a “humanization” frame was used to describe the victims. Topical emphasis, specific word
choices, and sources (Entman, 1993) dictated frames.
Conflict Frame. The reporter who wrote the October 10, 2015, story did not use the word
terrorism to describe the attack—although the words terror and terrorism were used by a pair of sources,
a political analyst, and the American government.
Rather than discuss the attack as terrorism, The Post referred to the attack alternatively as
“blasts,” “explosions,” “twin bombings,” and “a fiery explosion.” Importantly, the article describes the
perpetrators as “separatists,” not terrorists. Later, the piece refers to violent Kurdish activists as
“militants” and “militias” and “fighters.” The use of “separatists,” “militants,” “militias,” and “fighters”
rather than “terrorists” fed into the larger conflict frame at play in the piece. A conflict frame is one which
“emphasizes conflict between individuals, groups or institutions as a means of capturing audience interest”
(Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000, p. 95). Frames that focus on terrorism and criminality, in contrast, explain
violence as senseless aggression and serve to delegitimate specific acts of violence (Elmasry, 2009).
Warlike terms such as fighters and militias suggest a war or conflict frame rather than a terrorism frame
(Elmasry, 2009).
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The October 10, 2015, attack on Ankara was described as an act of war committed by one
warring faction against another. From the outset, the article provides an important backdrop—grounded in
an explanation of the historical conflict between the Turkish state and Kurds—for the attack. The subhead
referred to continued “violence between security forces and Kurdish separatists,” while the lead described
the attack as “a reminder of the growing conflicts Turkey faces.” The second paragraph also referenced
violence “that has flared [recently] between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists.” Later, the
article describes “Turkey’s decades-old struggle with the Kurds.” Near the article’s end, several
paragraphs discuss the historical rift.
Geopolitical Frame. To describe the attack, The Post also used a geopolitical frame, which can be
used by news outlets to emphasize “geopolitical calculations” (Douai & Lauricella, 2014, p. 15). The story’s
lead paragraph refers to Turkey’s dilemma “across the border in . . . Syria,” while the third paragraph
describes Turkey’s geopolitical alliances and considerations—specifically, this paragraph notes that Turkey
is a NATO member, a “key U.S. ally,” and that it “shares borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran.” The
paragraph also describes Turkey’s conflict with Russia over Syria. The article goes on to explain that
Syrian refugees in Turkey have been a “source of political instability.”
Humanization Frame. Contrary to patterns of previous coverage (see literature review), The
Washington Post’s October 11, 2015, article did humanize Muslim victims in Ankara. A front-page photo
showed a mourner kneeling near bodies, and a pair of photos on the inside page (onto which the article
continued) showed wounded victims. The text also used humanizing language, describing “dazed and
bloody demonstrators clinging to one another” and “bodies, some of them dismembered, lay on the
street.”
October 12, 2015
Several frames emerged from the analysis of the Post’s October 11 article about the aftermath of
the Ankara attack. Specifically, terrorism, blame, and conflict frames emerged from the close readings.
Terrorism Frame. In contrast to The Post’s October 11, 2015 article about the Ankara attack, the
newspaper’s October 12, 2015, coverage of the aftermath of the attack clearly describes the October 10,
2015, event as a “terrorist attack.” The article also quotes the Turkish government, which said it was
investigating the attack as an act of terrorism, and also a political analyst who suggested extremists
returning to Turkey from Syria could be to blame.
Blame Frame. However, rather than spend significant time describing the attack or its victims,
the article focuses primarily on criticisms of the Turkish government. The article’s most prominent frame
may be characterized as a blame frame, focusing on pinning blame against Turkish authorities. This frame
is significant, especially given that Turkish authorities were a target of the attackers.
The article’s headline, “Mourners Denounce Turkish Authorities in Wake of Attack,” sets the tone
for what follows. The lead describes “crowds of angry mourners” marching to “denounce Turkish
authorities.” The second paragraph notes that the opposition “condemned the authorities for failing to
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protect the demonstration.” The third paragraph documents a protester chant, which called Turkish
President Recep Tayeb Erdogan a “murderer.” Late in the article, a Kurdish official is quoted speaking
about the philosophy of the ruling government, which he describes as “not based on the idea of
citizenship; they divide the population between us and them.” The Kurdish official goes on to say, “They
don’t see our party offices or our members . . . as things that should be protected.” The story also
features a statement from a leftist opposition group, which suggests that Erdogan was attempting to “sow
chaos ahead of elections to gain more votes.”
Conflict Frame. The Post’s October 12, 2015, article also employed a conflict frame, although to a
lesser extent than the October 11 article. “Tensions between Turkey’s government and the country’s 14
million Kurds” were described, as were previous violent attacks perpetrated by both Kurdish factions and
the government.
The Paris Attack
The Washington Post’s coverage of the November 13, 2015, Paris attack differed significantly
from the paper’s coverage of the first Ankara attack. In terms of sheer prominence, coverage of the Paris
attack dwarfed coverage of the Ankara attack. The November 14 edition of The Post featured three large
news stories about the attack, including one prominently placed front-page story. Two of the three articles
were long—29 and 28 paragraphs—while the other was fairly short (12 paragraphs). The November 15
edition featured five more news stories, including three on the front page. The articles were all relatively
long: 30, 23, 46, 29, and 27 paragraphs long.
November 14, 2015
Three dominant frames emerged from the reading of the November 14, 2015, front-page article:
a terrorism frame, a “Western values” frame, and a humanization frame.
Terrorism Frame. The Post’s November 14, 2015, article framed the November 13 attack on Paris
as an act of “terrorism.” The terrorism frame was highly prominent, and a more specific form of
terrorism—religious terrorism—was also highlighted.
Words and phrases are key drivers of frames (Entman, 1993). Variations of the word terrorism
were used in the article’s subhead and again in the article’s second paragraph. The word was also used in
multiple quotes by sources, while other, similar phrases—”terrified fans,” “extremist groups,” “suicide
bombers,” “massacre,” and “mass murder”—were also used. Superlatives, such as “deadliest day” and
“worst terrorist attack on Western soil,” were also employed.
A vivid description of terrorism was provided when The Post’s article compared the attack to the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States: “The assaults represented the deadliest day
of attacks in France since World War II and one of the worst terrorist strikes on Western soil since
September 11, 2001.” Association is an important driver of frames (Entman, 1993). The religious
dimension of the attack was highlighted by phrases such as “Islamist extremism” and “Islamist gunmen”
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and several mentions of “the Islamic State,” a reference to ISIL, which the article implicated in the attack.
The story also mentioned that Muslim extremists celebrated the attack online.
The article also spoke to a sense of terror in Paris and across Europe. The subhead said France
“tightens border controls” while the lead spoke of “scenes of horror.” Other parts of the article spoke of
security measures, including “heavily armed security forces,” the declaration of a “state of emergency,”
the “deployment of the army,” and multiple mentions of “border controls.”
Western Values Frame. The article framed the attack not as an assault on a group of people, but
rather on Paris as a whole. Importantly, France was linked to the rest of the Western world, and the
attack was described as an assault on the West more generally.
The headline spoke of an “Assault on Paris.” The suggestion that an entire city was the target of
the attack represents a departure from coverage of the Ankara attack—the headline of The Post’s most
prominent article about the Ankara attack said that violence from that incident was carried out against “a
peace rally.” The second paragraph highlighted other attacks on Western soil, and the fifth paragraph
highlighted condemnations from “World leaders”—later in the article, American President Barack Obama is
quoted underscoring Western values: “He said the wave of violence was not just an assault on France but
‘an attack on all of humanity and universal values we share.’”
Humanization Frame. A humanization frame also emerged from the close reading of The Post’s
November 14, 2015, article. The article described “carnage” and explained how civilians were gunned
down while carrying out normally safe activities—”where tourists and residents had been enjoying the sort
of experiences . . . that define Friday night in Paris. . . . Soccer games, concerts and evening meals.”
Four separate photographs displayed either wounded victims or people fleeing violence, with each
photo including a caption describing scenes in detail. Also, the article noted that “People . . . fled in panic”
and that there were “piles of bodies in the street.” There was also specific mention of victims—one section
said victims were “wrapped in gold-colored heat blankets” and “had blood splattered on their clothing.”
One sentence noted that some victims “cried.” The article also featured multiple quotes from victims and
eyewitnesses describing scenes of violence.
November 15, 2015
On the second day of coverage of the Paris attack, The Post covered the event prominently. The
most prominently placed articles were three front-page stories placed side-by-side. To facilitate fair
comparison, just one of these articles was selected—the longest of the three, headlined “From Typical to
Terror in a Half-Hour.” The article was dominated by a terrorism frame and a humanization frame.
Terrorism Frame. The headline invoked the word terror, while the rest of the article described—in
vivid detail—specific scenes of violence. For example, one section reads, “At 9:20 p.m., an explosion
boomed through the stadium. A suicide bomber [blew] himself up outside, killing one passerby.” Another
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section reads, “Moments later, at 9:25 p.m., two gunmen stepped out . . . in front of Le Carillon, a modest
café-bar . . . and started shooting.”
The beginning of another paragraph says, “The shooters then walked across the street and
opened fire at a restaurant.” Later, the article reads, “Gunmen with assault weapons stepped out . . . and
opened fire at an Italian restaurant . . . a nearby café . . . and a laundromat.” Other suicide bombings are
described later in the article in similar detail.
The article also features several quotes from eyewitnesses describing scenes of violence. One
eyewitness was quoted as saying that the gunmen opened fire at one location for “at least three minutes,”
and another said that “a lot of people started screaming . . . some of them were running.” One person at
the scene of one shooting said, “We were lying down on the floor, trying not to move, pretending we were
dead . . . we could hear gunshots, screaming.” Later in the article, a political motivation was provided by
one eyewitness, a woman named Jasmine: “[The attackers] said, ‘What you’ve done to Syrians . . . you’re
paying for it.”
Humanization Frame. Much of the article discusses victims and witnesses of the attack.
Personalization is one key component of victim humanization (Elmasry, 2009). Importantly, personal
details, including names, ages, and occupations, are provided. Also, and as detailed above, several citizen
eyewitnesses were quoted in the story.
Details are provided about Stefano—”a 30-year-old Brazilian citizen working in Paris as an
artist”—and his involvement in the event. The article says, “Stefano saw his friend Gabriel lying on the
sidewalk covered in blood.” Stefano’s wife, Laurine Durand, was also quoted.
Other civilians quoted include a 32-year-old woman named Juliette, a technician named Louis H.,
a 49-year-old American named Helen Jane Wilson, and two citizens—Jasmine and Mary Sheridan—
identified only by their names. Some of those sourced were quoted in detail and provided information
about the scenes they witnessed, including lucid descriptions of both violence and fears. Details about one
of the deceased—a 23-year-old American California State University student, Nohemi Gonzalez—were also
provided.
The Maiduguri, Nigeria, Attack
The Maiduguri, Nigeria, attack was covered scantly by The Washington Post. Only a single eightparagraph article on page A10 of the February 1, 2016, edition was devoted to the incident. No
photographs or other images were published.
February 1, 2016
The Post’s article employed both “senseless aggression” and humanization frames.
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Senseless Aggression Frame. Although Boko Haram was identified as the perpetrator of the
attack, The Post did not use any variations of the word terrorism in its coverage. The Post covered the
violence in detail, describing it as senseless aggression committed by “extremists.” The article did not
provide background on Boko Haram, mention that the group is an Al-Qaeda offshoot, or discuss the
violence as part of the problem of international terrorism. These omissions are meaningful. Importantly,
the piece framed the event as an internal, domestic problem and attributed it to “homegrown Islamist
extremists” and a “six-year Islamist uprising” that has resulted in the deaths of “20,000 people.” Overall,
then, the senseless aggression frame was characterized by an emphasis on local instability, rather than
global terrorism.
Humanization Frame. The article goes to some length to humanize victims, beginning with a
narrative lead describing, in vivid detail, an eyewitness account of the violence. The lead mentions “the
screams of children burning to death.” The lead is followed by a description of “charred corpses and bodies
with bullet wounds littered [in] the streets.”
The Second Ankara Attack
The second Ankara attack studied here—carried out March 13, 2016—was not covered
prominently by The Washington Post in the two days following the event. Although the attack targeted a
busy area, included 37 civilian casualties, and represented a continuation of earlier terrorism in Ankara,
just a single article was devoted to the attack on both March 14, 2016, and March 15, 2016. Both articles
were published on inside pages (A8 and A10, respectively), but the March 14 article was “teased” with a
short blurb on the front page.
March 14, 2016
The March 14, 2016, article was teased with a short headline blurb that read, “Violence in
Ankara,” followed by a short description: “A car bomb near a busy square along a main boulevard in
Turkey’s capital left at least 34 people dead.” The decision to avoid the word terrorism fed into a conflict
frame, which emerged from the analysis. The article also employed a geopolitical frame.
Conflict Frame. The article, which, at just 13 paragraphs long, was relatively short, used
variations of the word terrorism only twice, both near the end of the article and at neither time to describe
the violent event at issue. Rather, word choices dictated a conflict frame. The article’s main headline used
the word blast to describe the violence, while the subhead used the phrase “major bombing.” The lead
paragraph described the violence as “a car bomb in the heart of the Turkish capital.” The article continued
to use similar phrasing—”explosion,” “bombing,” “blast.” The article referred to the attackers as “militants”
and speculated that the perpetrators were members of the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a group
officially labeled a terrorist organization by both the United States and Turkey and which has claimed
responsibility for numerous civilian-targeted bombings.
Perhaps more important, the article’s general emphasis was on the ongoing conflict between the
Turkish government and Kurds. The subhead said that the bombing “raises fears that wars are spreading,”
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the lead paragraph noted “that violence from the war against Kurdish militants in the southeast is spilling
into Turkish cities,” and the article later spoke of “escalating violence between the Turkish government
and the PKK.” The article went on to both explicitly link the PKK to the attack and describe earlier attacks
carried out by the group.
Geopolitical Frame. Much of the article’s remaining topical emphasis focused on Turkey’s larger
regional policies and geopolitical considerations. For instance, the article said, “The violence has unnerved
Turkey, which finds itself entangled in fights on two fronts, against the Kurds in southeastern Turkey and
against the Islamic State in Syria. The two wars are becoming ever more closely intertwined.” The article
also noted that “the fighting between Turkey and the YPG [Syrian People’s Protection Units] has caused
friction with the United States, too, which is allied with both of them in the war against the Islamic State.”
March 15, 2016
On March 15, 2016, The Washington Post devoted just one small (10 paragraphs) article about
the March 14, 2016, attack. The article focused not on the attack per se, but mostly on the Turkish
government’s response. When the article did speak to the March 14 attack, the dominant frame was,
again, a conflict frame.
Conflict Frame. The article, titled “Turkey Hits Kurdish Militants’ Positions,” focused mostly on
Turkey’s military response, something which fed into the dominant conflict frame that characterized the
piece.
The March 14 attack was referred to as a “separatist bombing” and a “blast” and the perpetrators
as “Kurdish militants,” “separatists,” and “attackers.” The attack and investigation were described, but no
variations of the word terrorism were used at any point in the article.
The news story said the conflict between the Kurds and Turkish government could be
“spreading,” and mentioned Turkish government strikes against “PKK positions.” The piece noted the PKK
has “waged a violent campaign since the 1980s.” Previous PKK attacks were described, as were acts of
Turkish government violence. These editorial decisions took focus away from the attack and placed focus
on the larger battle between the PKK and Turkey.
The Belgium Attack
On the two days following the attack on Belgium, The Washington Post offered up very prominent
coverage of the event. On both days, five news articles were published, including three on each front
page—in all, then, there were 10 articles and six front-page articles about the attack. In addition, there
were many photographs, including multiple large, half-page photographs. Most of the published articles
were quite long. The three front-page articles published on March 23, 2016, measured 29, 34, and 23
paragraphs long, and the remaining two articles were 22 and 24 paragraphs long. On March 24, 2016, the
three front-page articles were 34, 25, and 25 paragraphs long, and the remaining two articles were 15
and 25 paragraphs long.
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The most prominently placed article on each day was analyzed. The examined articles were the
longest of the published front-page reports. Both articles began above the fold.
March 23, 2016
On March 23, 2016, the most prominently placed article in The Washington Post about the
Belgium attack was titled “Suicide Bombs at Airport, on Subway.” The subhead read, “Officials had
expected an attack but were stunned.” The dominant frames emerging from the analysis were a terrorism
frame and a humanization frame.
Terrorism Frame. A terrorism frame was established by both the headline and lead, which read,
in part, “Islamic State suicide bombers brought terror, chaos and bloodshed to the city at the heart of
European unity on Tuesday.” Throughout the article, variations of the word terrorism, comparisons to
previous terrorist attacks perpetrated on Western soil, and frequent links and references to the “Islamic
State”—an organization universally recognized as a terrorist group—served to drive home the terrorism
frame.
The terror frame was also driven home by vivid descriptions of the violent acts. The story noted
that the “magnitude” of the attack “was stunning,” while descriptions such as “nail-spewing bombs,”
“mass killings,” “explosive devices loaded with nails and chemicals” helped cement the terrorism frame.
The piece also spoke to a sense of fear among people in Belgium and across Europe, highlighting
persistent fears and suggesting that people across Europe should remain scared of the possibility of future
attacks. For example, the article mentioned “a renewed sense of threat that spilled far beyond Brussels,”
while also noting that “Tuesday’s mass killings add [Brussels] to an ignominious but growing list of
European capitals that have been struck in the past year by deadly attacks . . . by the Islamic State.” The
article referenced “evidence that more [attacks] could be on the way,” and also referred to “a tide of
homegrown extremism.” The article went further, noting that the Islamic State “has repeatedly threatened
to hit Europe at its core.” A quote from the Belgian prime minster also helped establish the sense of fear:
“What we had feared has happened.” Near the end of the news story, further detail about larger European
fears was provided: “The latest bloodshed made clear that European capitals remain perilously
vulnerable.” A terrorism expert was quoted at the end of the article: “This is a kind of scenario every
capital in Europe feared.”
The article described Belgian’s terrorist threat as being derived from the Islamic State, which, the
article said, is based on both “foreign fighters [from Syria]” and homegrown terrorists, those who have
been “radicalized in [Belgian] cities.”
Humanization Frame. The Post article examined here humanized victims of the Belgium attack,
feeding into a dominant humanization frame. Three separate photographs of victims and rich descriptions
of victim struggle were key drivers of the frame.
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One photo, placed prominently on the front page, above the fold, showed two bloodied female
victims. A second photo on the inside page showed a wounded man being cared for by paramedics. A third
photo including the caption, “Airport workers leave the terminal. Many of those injured in the explosions
lost limbs as shrapnel radiated through packed crowds.”
The article body also noted that “many of the injured lost limbs as shrapnel from the blasts
radiated through packed crowds,” while also mentioning that “children” were seen “cowering on a bloody
floor amid the maimed and the dead.” A description of the subway scene said, “Footage . . . revealed
desperate scenes as people dressed for a day’s work stumbled from the mangled wreckage into a smokedrenched tunnel.”
March 24, 2016
The article examined from The Post’s March 24 coverage was titled “Bombings Push a Battered
Continent Even Closer to Its Breaking Point.” This article represented a departure from other articles in
that it focused only tangentially on the March 22, 2016, bombings. The article focused primarily on the
larger consequences of terrorism for Europe. The dominant frame that emerged from the analysis of this
article was an “Islamist terrorism endangers Europe” frame.
Islamist Terrorism Endangers Europe Frame. The article’s headline, noting that Europe is a
“battered continent” and close to its “breaking point” helped establish the article’s dominant frame. The
lead paragraph, meanwhile, built on the headline by associating modern-day Europe with mid-20th
century Europe. Entman (1993) argued that “association” can be an important element in the framing
process.
Specifically, the story used a narrative lead focusing on an elderly man, Corrado Pirzio-Biroli, who
was nearly killed in the March 22, 2016, attack on Belgium. Pirzio-Biroli, the lead says, “was a wartime
prisoner” as a child, while his “mother was held in a concentration camp” and his grandfather “was hanged
for an aborted attempt to overthrow Hitler.” The article then made the explicit link between the two eras
in question and the kinds of violent crimes that characterized them: “And in the Europe of his old age, the
75-year-old with twinkling blue eyes narrowly missed being blown up on Tuesday morning as he rode the
Brussels subway.”
The article then referenced the “Islamic State bomber” that carried out the subway bombing, and
said that “the very idea of Europe [is now] under extraordinary strain.” The mentioning of the “Islamic
State” and “extraordinary strain” suggested that Islamist terrorism is one of the primary reasons for
Europe’s trauma. The rest of the article makes this clear with mentions of an “unparalleled inflow of
refugees” and “the reality of mass-casualty attacks in its largest cities.” The headline on the inside page,
onto which the article continues, drove the point home: “Homegrown bombings, migrant crisis paint
Europe as a continent in disarray.”
The article noted that Pirzio-Biroli is scared “for the continent’s future,” with quotes from both the
French Prime Minister and a Carnegie research analyst echoing his sentiments. Pirzio-Biroli was later
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quoted again: “We’re in a very deep crisis,” he said. The article noted that the March 22 attacks “quite
literally shook the foundations of the E.U.” and added to “a palpable sense that Europe can’t cope with its
many overlapping crises.” The news story also said that European involvement in the Middle East led
directly to both a “historic number of refugees” coming to Europe and the increase of “radicalization at
home.” Overall, the article’s collective emphasis on refugees, Muslim extremism, violence, and an
uncertain future worked to solidify the “Islamist terrorism endangers Europe” frame.
Discussion
Results from this analysis suggest meaningful differences between the way The Washington Post
framed a pair of Muslim-perpetrated terrorist attacks against Western European targets, on the one hand,
and three other attacks against Muslim-majority communities, on the other hand. In coverage of the Paris
and Belgium attacks, The Post used terrorism frames to structure coverage, while consistently humanizing
victims and drawing links between European societies and the Western world more generally. In contrast,
attacks against Ankara and Maiduguri, which were covered much less prominently, were primarily framed
as internal conflicts. The Post did humanize victims of both Ankara and Maiduguri, but the paper was less
likely to humanize victims of these attacks than they were to humanize victims in Paris and Brussels. For
example, in covering Ankara and Maiduguri, The Post provided fewer images of victims and did not include
as much detail of victim fear and struggle, victim quotes, or personal victim details (e.g., names, ages,
and occupations).
Some of the framing differences can be attributed to the different nature of the events. Although
the analysis has sought an apples-to-apples comparison—by selecting prominent attacks with significant
casualties carried out during the same basic time period—there are important differences between the
attacks. Most important, the violence in Ankara was carried out as part of a larger context—an ongoing
conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state. This backdrop may be one reason for The Post’s
alternative framing of the Ankara attacks. Similarly, a violent Boko Haram uprising has been ongoing in
Nigeria for several years. However, these political differences do not completely explain such vast framing
differences.
In the end, both the Ankara and Maiduguri attacks easily fit the textbook definition of terrorism
(Ganor, 2007), and both the PKK and Boko Haram are considered terrorist organizations by the United
States and NATO. Moreover, the attacks inflicted significant casualties—the total number of casualties
from the two Ankara attacks, 140, was similar to the total number of casualties from the Paris and
Belgium attacks (161). Meanwhile, the Boko Haram attack inflicted the second most casualties of the five
studied attacks. The larger conflicts between the Turkish state and the Kurds, and Boko Haram and the
Nigerian state, are significant details, but so is the fact that armed fighters chose to target civilians in
these conflicts. The fact that The Post only scantily covered the Nigeria attack, which claimed nearly 100
victims, is also significant and further underscores a point that other authors (see Barnard, 2016) have
made in prior writing: Some American newspapers pay less attention to non-Western, non-Christian, nonWhite victims.
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Importantly, the frame delineations laid out here do not tell the entire story of The Washington
Post coverage of the attacks. There was a type of bipolarity at play in all of The Post’s coverage—localized
in coverage of Ankara and Maiduguri, and globalized in coverage of both Paris and Brussels. In covering
Ankara and Maiduguri, the newspaper highlighted domestic divisions and local discord. This focus on the
domestic division deemphasized terrorism as a global phenomenon. This deemphasis suggested that
violence against civilians in Turkey and Nigeria does not fit the standard definition of terrorism, belonging,
instead, to a different category that is the byproduct of local volatility. In this way, The Post localized what
is technically a global phenomenon. In contrast, in covering Paris and Belgium, The Post globalized the
local, placing both attacks in the larger context of the West’s “war on terror.” In doing this, the paper
suggested unity of Western societies, contexts, and values.
Although one could argue that the Turkish violence, in particular, was fundamentally different
because it was not immediately claimed by ISIL, this argument misses the mark. First, ISIL did claim
responsibility for one of the Ankara attacks. Second, and as noted above, both Ankara attacks fit the
standard definition of terrorism, and the PKK, likely responsible for the first attack, is classified as a
terrorist organization by major international entities. Third, and most important, if The Post’s Paris and
Belgium coverage was driven primarily by the fact that Islamist terrorists carried out the attacks, why did
the newspaper not prominently cover the attack in Nigeria, which was carried out by an Al-Qaeda affiliate?
A more plausible explanation for The Post’s framing and attention differences, then, might lie in previous
literature about Western news media coverage of non-Western human life. As described in the literature
review, researchers have noted discrepancies in Western news treatment of Western and non-Western
victims. The biggest difference between Ankara and Maiduguri, on the one